Over two hundred outsourced workers who are members of the GMB at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, South London struck for 48 hours on 24-26 November.

On the 24th the workers, who are employed by Dutch multinational ISS as cleaners, security, ward hostesses, caterers, on the switchboard and as porters, struck alongside directly employed NHS staff striking for their national pay dispute.

After only two weeks of action, the marking boycott in pre-92 universities has been put on hold until mid-January.

The decision to abandon the action for talks just as it was beginning to bite has prompted furious criticism by branches, unhappy at the enormous compromises the leadership seems prepared to accept to cut a deal. There is already evidence that universities are taking advantage of the suspension to bring forward exam-setting deadlines. This will make it much harder to make action effective in January.

In leaked documents from HMRC (the tax and customs part of the civil service) we see in the open how bosses try to “handle” unions.

In the document a senior manager writes:“...If we are unable to persuade the new GEC (the union body that runs the PCS union in HMRC) and full time officials to change their stance this suggests that the usual rules for engagement with a trade union will not work.”

The paper recommends “aiming to marginalise PCS by maintaining dialogue only to meet statutory minimum requirements.”

From the Youth of All Nations reads to me as a bitter complaint against the ruling classes on all sides of the First World War playing out their arguments with the sufferings and lives of soldiers.

Its title declares both a bitterness of the young against old leaders, and an internationalist outlook. Then its fifteen four-line (quatrain) stanzas spell out the manipulations of the call to war and promise rebellion rather than reverence. The strict iambic tetrameter rhythm creates an impression of an army marching to settle scores with its rulers.

Duncan Morrison’s irate letter (Solidarity 344) misses the point in Jon Lansman’s column in Solidarity 343 which really most calls for criticism.

Jon wrote that “no shortcoming of Ed Miliband is responsible for the rise of UKIP.” He probably meant that no other halfway-likely leader of the Labour Party in anything like its present shape could have stopped a rise of UKIP, either, which is true.

A bill defining Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people” was passed on Sunday 23 November by the Israeli cabinet, despite protests that this bill undermines the “democratic” character of Israel and discriminates against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise 20% of the population.

Fourteen ministers supported the bill while Justice Minister Livni and five ministers from the Yesh Atid party voted against.